Evolution question for you scientists out there...!

So when I use to be a christian and doing A level biology we studies evolution quite alot. Now i couldnt help but notice a few flaws. I asked me teacher about them but she couldnt really give me the answers! So im hoping some one here can! I want to improve my knowledge as i know my christian friends will fire theses same questions at me soon enough!

So one example is how a bird formed through evolution... Because obviously through natural selection... a random mutation only stays and multiplies if it benefits that species. Now for wings to be useful the animal and structure of the wings has to be pretty perfect...So my problem is before it got to this stage the wing say a flap of skin or elongated bone ect would have been no use and if anything a hindrance... so how did birds and flying animals come to be baring the above in mind?

Also why is there no apparent evidence of macroevolution and only microevolution! please help out guys! i need to arm my self with knowledge against my thiest friends ect!!!

Replies to This Discussion

Good questions... you might find some good answers on Talk Origins. In the meantime, I'll add my thoughts and hopefully others will be able to elaborate/correct.

Now for wings to be useful the animal and structure of the wings has to be pretty perfect

This is incorrect... For wings to be useful for flying they have to be a certain shape and size. For other uses, wings that are not useful for flying might be useful for something else. (e.g. jumping, gliding, attracting a mate).

why is there no apparent evidence of macroevolution and only microevolution!

Because there is no distinction between macro and micro evolution. Macroevolution is really just many microevolutions. There is an abundance of evidence for "macro" evolution if you expand the timescale to millions of years.

Not being a biologist (but being an astronomer..), here's a few thoughts. I've heard creationists complaining about how an incomplete organ like an eye or in your case, a birds wings, are completely useless. That's what they want you to think. Imagine a birds ancestor which has developed the start of what will be a wing. Clearly the creature can't take to the skies and fly like a hawk, but the proto-wing that he has might be useful to allow him to leap into the air and glide a few feet - just enough to evade a predator or catch its own food - enough to survive another day and reproduce. As the proto-wing improves in later generations, the creature can evade its predators better and catch its food better and eventually, the descendants of that early creature can take to the skies like the Red Baron. Today, flight in birds seems almost completely necessary for their survival. You can imagine a similar evolution of the eye. Early creatures with an organ that can just barely detect light might be able to survive because the shadow of their hunter alerts them to take shelter. Better light detection means better survival until today, we have eyes that can read this webpage.

Hi there, this is a complex subject .The religious people usually fall back upon the creationism to answer these type of questions. One way of answering these questions is going down the path of human brain actions; our brains use active thought energy to function, sadly this is part intelligent energy only by percentage. The universe runs on full intelligence energy. The very latest complex computers are still limited by this problem.

It's not ready for prime time yet, nor easily explainable to people lacking genetics and microbiology, but pay attention to those fields over the next several years. Ditto for epigenetics, embryology, stem cell biology, and gene mapping. All those fields provide evidence for how evolution occured and occurs, as well as provide collaborative evidence with fossil evidence, and is predictive of what kinds of fossils we will probably find in the future.

I'm becoming more in favor of showing the success of science and its predictions, rather than going way over people's heads with detailed scientific explanations, especially when they're already in denial of the efficacy of science. We've already passed beyond the point of explanations that are easily understood without reading several college-level courses and/or textbooks. (And in that vein, I'd point out how many thousands of college level and higher textbooks and papers there are that explain the sciences, and 90% percent of them come to pretty much the same explanations and conclusions independently and with healthy doses of skepticism, even of each other.)

Sorry, hope you don't consider that to be a non-answer to your question. But speaking of non-answers, I guarantee you that the religious goditit non-answers will just fall further and further behind the scientific answers. All sciences use the same, successful method, which "coincidentally" support each other's evidence and observations over time.